Here’s a killer photo of Paul during his taekwondo demo taken by our friend Josh Meles. It’s taekwontacular!
The rest of Josh’s photos are here, my photos are here, and the videos I shot are here.
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Last Friday’s Party, part 1
Last Friday, Eldon invited me to join him at Jo-Anne Liburd’s 30th birthday party. It would’ve been a fairly mellow evening if not for a couple of notable events. Jo-Anne is a friend of Eldon’s and one of the organizers of the For the Love of Breasts gala where I had a very, very, very good time.
(By the way, the Flash-only nature of their site makes them terribly hard to find on the web — it turns out that the number one Google result for the phrase “for the love of breasts” is this blog. It’s flattering, but that spot truly belongs to them, and they should post some pertinent data such as how many people attended, how much money was raised for breast cancer, and to whom and how the money will be handed over. All I have is a set of photos showing how much fun the event was and how much fun I had, and some elliptical hinting at the ensuing make-outs. Interesting reading, but the point of the event was to raise money for breast cancer research, not to provide me with opportunities to snog.)
Let me digress for a moment: the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, starts with the “Kobayashi Maru” simulation, in which a ship’s commnder is led into a trap from which there is no escape. It’s called the “no-win scenario”, and it’s a test to determine the character of a potential captain. It requires a large room to simulate the bridge of a starship, plus “actors” to play the part of the bridge crew.
It would be simpler and cheaper to simply put the test candidate in a party full of WASP chicks. You’d get the same result.
One of the first people I ran into at the party was Alison, who is the wan-looking woman in this photo (first shown in this entry):
She’s also the happier-looking woman in these photos from when we joined the band onstage.
She introduced us to her sister and a friend of hers, and we started talking. Ten minutes into the conversation, I was feeling a few hunger pangs as a result of having had a light dinner and looked to the table to see what kind of snack food was available. The table was to my left, and Alison stood between me and it.
While I was checking out the table, Alison’s sister leaned over and whispered into her ear. Alison made a look of mock horror on her face, turned to me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Accordion Man,” she said. “My sister says that you were checking out my boobs.”
“Beg pardon?” I asked, still thinking about how nice some sliced green peppers in sour cream would be.
“My boobs. You were checking out my boobs,” she exclaimed. She cupped each breast in her hand, lifted both and pointed them straight at me. It was then that I notcied that she was wearing a white tank top, which only served to reinforce the fact that she had breasts, and that you should look at them.
“Well, they’re very nice, but…”
“So you were looking at them!” she exclaimed.
“I told you!” said her sister.
I sighed. There was no winning this argument.
“That’s okay,” said Alison, who then pinched my cheek. “It’s kind of cute how you boys deny everything. I’m going to get some wine now.”
As she left for the kitchen, her sister leaned over to me and said “I saw you checking out her boobs. They’re pretty nice, huh?”
“Um, they’re quite…becoming.”
“Okay, but you shouldn’t stare. Girls don’t like that.”
It was too late. Just like someone who’s told not to think of a purple cow, the breasts that originally held no interest for me were like eye magnets, and I spent the rest of the evening trying not to look at them.
That’s the downside of being a guy in North America at the start of the 21st century: I’m forever getting blamed for 10,000 years of sexism that I didn’t even get to enjoy.
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Keep those cards and letters coming
I’m receiving a steady trickle of emails to suggestions for this coming Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks, a feature moving from Canadian blog to Canadian blog in which the host blogger points to Canadian blogs and blog entries of note. This week’s Carnival is hosted at the music blog Switching to Glide, and it’s organized around a theme called “The $6.99 Breakfast”. I’ll organize mine around something both seasonally appropriate and Canadian.
If you’ve got a suggestion, let me know in the comments or drop me a line!
In the meantime, enjoy this lovely Hugh McLeod comic on what blogs are about, taken from a Guardian article written by Rebecca Blood, called The revolution should not be eulogised.
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Awwwww…
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Links-a-plenty
It’s a busy day for me today, but hopefully these links will tide you over…
‘Low-carb burgers’ are wrapped in lettuce. The American burger chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. are introducing these. Cool, but did it have to be iceberg lettuce?
Hippies whining about the Atkins diet. The diet may prevent obesity, diabetes and related diseases, but we’ve got spotted owls to save here!
Soccer players are weird, man.
Craigblog. Craig “Craigslist” Newmark’s blog.
Five geek social fallacies. “Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies — ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.”
A dearth of dating. The Boston Globe’s story on how dating is out and “friends with benefits” is in. In spite of stories like Worst Date Ever, I still prefer dating over um-friending.
I didn’t know that comic book lettering was a hotly-debated topic in the industry.
The most popular web page in Shelbyville. It’s for an organization called C.U.D.D.L.E., which is an acronym for Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education. In other words, a site about cousin marriage. Even if you find a topic a bit icky, they do have a useful chart that makes it easy to figure out what a “third cousin twice removed” is.
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Carnival of the Canucks!
The music blog Switching to Glide (named after the Kings song of the same name) is the current host of Carnival of the Canucks, which is:
a weekly roundup of the best posts from Canadian blogs. Carnival of the Canucks is a weblog collaboration design to gain exposure for blogs and posts you may not have seen during your regular week’s readings. The Carnival will be hosted at a different blog every week. Each week’s host blogger is responsible for gathering their favorite posts and posting their Carnival on Tuesdays.
Carnival of the Canucks is modeled on Carnival of the Vanities and Carnival of the Capitalists, so have a look at those if you need more info.
This week’s inaugural edition has a theme: The $6.99 Breakfast and covers all manner of goodies by all manner of Canadian Bloggers, some you undoubtedly know, and some you might have never read before.
This week’s edition was compiled by David “Ranting and Roaring” Janes, Mike “The Campblog” Campbell and Alan “GenX at 40” McLeod.
Next week’s edition, the just-in-time for Christmas edition, will be compiled by the proud Canadian pictured below:
Cue the stereo screams from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Kathy shaking her fists at Heaven, crying out “Dear God, not Accordion Chump!” and Deenster, her face buried in her hands, asking “Isn’t his ego already big enough?”
But seriously, folks, it’s a honour to be asked to host next week’s Carnival of the Canucks. If you see a particularly noteworthy blog entry written by someone based in Canada between now and next Tuesday, let me know, either via the comments for this post or by email. I’ll add it to an extra-special category that I’ll create just for this occasion.
American military training produces fine soldiers, but the euphemistic and managerial way in which they are taught to speak certainly drains all poetry from their language. The New York Times, in the article U.S. Officers Display the ‘Rat Hole’ Where Hussein Hid, quotes Colonel James B. Hickey, who led the raid that resulted in the capture of Saddam “Scruffy” Hussein:
“From a military point of view, if you lop the head off a snake, the snake’s not going to be so viable after that,” he said.
It gets the point across, but Arma virumque cano it ain’t.
Perhaps I should try some mil-speak flirting with The Redhead:
“Please rendezvous with this officer for a dinner sortie, to be followed by accordion operations, the deployment of wine and dancing maneouvres. Your pants will not be so viable after that.”